1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to enterprise computing systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for automatically executing rules in enterprise computing systems.
2. Related Art
Many organizations use enterprise systems to manage and store large amounts of data. These enterprise systems typically use different types of policy, workflow, subscription, and/or preference frameworks to aid in the process of administering and accessing the enterprise system. However, these frameworks are typically add-on services and are fraught with problems.
These frameworks commonly make the following assumptions: policies are used to centralize the business rules; preferences maintain the various settings, which for example declare choices, desires, course of actions, or customizations; subscriptions are contractual equivalents of preferences expressed as conditions and actions upon interesting events; and preference profiles are collections of preferences that are associated with certain states of a user's presence in the system, including the user's activity, status, mood, etc. Unfortunately, there presently exists no common way to interrelate these different frameworks in a way that is standardized across all elements of an enterprise system.